The best content marketing tools for your startup or small business

Content marketing as a technique has become extremely competitive over the past few years. As more and more businesses have discovered, it is no longer possible to simply blog about your various industry-related topics and expect to rank on search. As Facebook continues to tighten the noose over ‘clickbaity’ content, it is no longer possible to reach hundreds of likes and shares either.

But having said that, content marketing continues to be among the most valuable of marketing strategies primarily because it lets the customer ‘discover’ your product as opposed to being pitched aggressively. The conversions and loyalty that the former strategy delivers has typically been higher than what aggressive selling offers. In this article, we will take a look at some of the best content marketing tools in the market today and what makes them vital for your business.

As a content marketer, one of the most pertinent questions is to know what topic ideas drive the most traffic to your site. Serpstat does this, as well as many other things like understanding what topics are driving traffic to your competitor and what topics get the most social shares for your competitor. Finding new topic ideas is a breeze–all you have to do is enter one or more keywords related to your business in the ‘Search’ box on your dashboard. This will give you a list of related keyword suggestions from Google. You may now click on the ‘Only Questions’ tab to view a whole bunch of question-based keywords that make for great blog topics–something that directly resonates with your buyer persona.

Another tool that is popular among a lot of content marketers is BuzzSumo. This tool lets you discover blog topics based on what is trending or what has been shared by other users. The tool lets you filter the results based on guest posts, infographics, giveaways, interviews and videos to identify the kind of topics that can give you the most mileage. My only gripe with this tool is that it bases the topics off what has been already covered successfully by your competitors. Using this tool in silo could thus mean you always cover topics that competition has already done successfully.

Once you have identified the best topics to write on using the tools above, the next step is to go ahead and actually create and distribute this content. ClearVoice is a platform that lets you prepare an editorial calendar, find established writers who you can contract the work to, get the content written and distribute it among the top influencers in the industry. ClearVoice also comes with reports to measure revisions, turnaround times, content quality and content performance.

Curata is essentially made of two tools to curate and market content. The content marketing platform helps you create and collaborate on content from multiple marketing automation and CRM systems like Salesforce Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo and HubSpot. It provides users with “data driven insights” that help you produce content that can generate social shares and leads, as well as generate revenue. Besides being a good tool for content generation, Curata’s power lies with a reporting dashboard that helps you drill down specific types of content that generated revenues and identify what worked and what did not.

Content marketing is not at all about generating clickbait articles and keyword stuffed content. Content marketing strategy is about identifying patterns and trends in what your buyer looks for before purchasing your product. By making your content visible to your target customer before they make a purchase, you are not only establishing credibility but also helping them ‘discover’ your product and thus convert. What other tools have worked for you? Share them in the comments.

The best content marketing tools for your startup or small business

StartUp Beat has relaunched to take a new and improved look at startups from around the world. We will continue to profile the world’s most innovative early-stage startups through company pitches, interviews and guest columns from entrepreneurial experts. StartUp Beat is now based in Medellín, Colombia, one of Latin America’s burgeoning tech hubs.